Right of Return
Sanaz Sohrabi | Caroline So Jung Lee | Mona Kasra | Peng Zuqiang
April 10 to May 8, 2021 [online]
Right of Return is an online exhibition of media works by four international artists exploring revolutionary politics, diasporic knowledge and the intersection of collective memory vs. archival evidence.
Sanaz Sohrabi uses Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp and an anonymous photo taken at the Refah School in Tehran from which to consider the myriad meanings of the Persian word “temsaal.” Notes on Seeing Double incisively dismantles and reconnects these two images to consider the friable truth of representation. In 1632 Amsterdam, anatomy theatres were a form of entertainment for those who could afford it. These public dissections gained cachet the sooner they were scheduled after the state executions which provided corpses. In February 1979 in Tehran, an unknown photographer captures a thronging post-revolutionary crowd gathered to greet Ayatollah Khomeini at one of his weekly meetings. This photograph, enlarged to its limits, reveals “otherwise unnoticeable fragments, shadows, cropped objects and figures, characters who remain untouched or indiscernible. An image whose ghostly fragments and visual residues continue to linger.” Equating this to a sort of dissection, an opening up, Sohrabi asks how we can “see these factual documents of a series of historical events otherwise, outside their original frame of reference?”
Caroline So Jung Lee documents a return to Korea in search of the intergenerational origin stories of the country’s nascent feminism. An interlocutor speaks of the ascending hopes for the “alpha girls” of the 80s and 90s. Raised with a belief in their own agency and a more equitable world but impeded by the seemingly inexorable forces of patriarchy and a newly fractious economy, this new generation were “expecting a world that was ready for them, but it was not.” Unsettling time, At the Bottom of the Sea shifts backwards and forwards, between the unrelenting movement of Korea’s cities, the implacable forces of nature and the furious chants of the Gwanghwamun protestors unwilling to cede their futures to the past. 16mm film grain, hand-processing and solarization both abstract and personalize these individual narratives.
Twenty years after her departure, Mona Kasra seeks to recapture a memory of her former home in Tehran through satellite images, aerial and 360° photography. Inbetweenness confronts this lack of resolution, as Kasra’s search for conclusive evidence is frustrated, truth crumbling under data and time. Left to the unreliability of locative efforts, Kasra must reimagine the place she knew through the simulacra available and her own senses. “I look for traces of home everywhere. Sometimes I find it in a bowl of Persian rice. Sometimes in the loud thunder reminding me of missile attacks during the war between Iran and Iraq. Sometimes I find home on the streets of Los Angeles. It all depends…I can’t get close.”
Inauguration exposes the capricious nature of oral family narratives and official records to deconstruct the compelling and unreliable story of a failed assassination that was either the work of a solitary individual or at the behest of a revolutionary organization. The “facts” say would-be assassin George Fong, who worked as a cook in Berkeley, bought a revolver and taught himself to shoot in order to dispatch visiting Prince Zaixun and help free China of Manchurian rule. Born in the USA and radicalized by the Young China Association, Fong either choked at the crucial moment—fearing he would injure bystanders in the crowd assembled to greet Zaixun—or was apprehended by a detective from the Chinatown police tipped off to the plot. Foreshadowing the 1910 event, visuals tells the story of two Chinese-Cuban activists’ attempt to attend the inauguration of the Young China Association in San Francisco a year earlier. Ultimately, Fong’s fate remains as much of a mystery as the definitive truth in Peng’s decoding of historical facts and fictions.
Notes on Seeing Double
Sanaz Sohrabi | 2018 | 11 min
What is the anatomy of a revolution? Masses of bodies with a collective desire? Notes on Seeing Double takes the figure of speech of “temsaal” in Farsi as its point of departure to unpack this question. By juxtaposing a documentary photograph taken in February of 1979 in Tehran and a painting by Rembrandt depicting the famous anatomy theatre of Amsterdam in 1632, Notes on Seeing Double analyzes the conditions of visuality within different systems of power/knowledge production. It looks at the threshold of seeing and remembering; a gateway into unpacking the relationship between pre-existing images, language, memory and the ways images are entangled with different processes of visualization.
In his seminal book, What do images want? The lives and loves of images, media scholar W.J.T. Mitchell writes: “Sometimes the disappearance of the object of visual desire in a picture is a direct trace of the activity of generations of viewers.” Notes on Seeing Double takes this dialectical system of reception as the starting point to unravel the marginal histories and affective registers with which all images are charged. The dialectical image becomes both the symptom and the method of dealing with and through images; the constellation of multiplied singularities which will give rise to moments of realization and meaning-making. Stream of thoughts are accompanied by sutured images, combining diaristic essayist tradition with prose-fiction. It weaves together observational footage with historical images and wavers between being imaginative, fictitious or real.
Sanaz Sohrabi is a research-based artist, filmmaker and a Fonds de Recherche du Québec Société et Culture (FRQSC) doctoral fellow at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Society and Culture in Montréal. Her work engages with the politics of recovery in photographic archives and the role of photography and film as technologies of public-making and subject positioning. Navigating the archival condition vis-à-vis the image dispositif, Sohrabi’s work seeks to unearth and map the superstructures wherein ideological formations emerge as nodes and spaces of spectatorship, visuality, and erasure. She received her BFA from University of Tehran College of Fine Arts and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago with a merit scholarship. Sohrabi’s work has been screened and exhibited internationally at Montréal International Documentary Film Festival (RIDM), International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR), Ann Arbor Film Festival (Winner of juror’s award), Indie Lisboa, European Media Arts Festival, Athens International Film and Video Festival, Kasseler Dokfest (nominated for Golden Key Award), Images Festival, Centre Clarke Montréal and Beirut Art Center.
At the Bottom of the Sea
Caroline So Jung Lee | 2019 | 11 min
A filmmaker travels to South Korea to document the rising feminist movement responding to brutal patriarchal norms and a spy cam epidemic. Leading up to the protest of December 22, 2018 in Gwanghwamun Square in Seoul, the filmmaker journeys throughout rural and urban areas of the country, interviewing women of different generations and backgrounds about their private and public lives. Juxtaposed with these women’s stories are images of water and the natural world bursting through the cracks of the everyday, telling a story of kinetic, spiritual and emotional movement.
Caroline So Jung Lee is a settler Korean filmmaker and interdisciplinary artist born in Tkaronto, the traditional territory of the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishnabeg, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee and the Wendat peoples. Caroline currently lives on the unceded ancestral territory of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh Nations (Vancouver, BC). In 2019, she won the VIFF Best Canadian Short Film Award, Video Out Distribution Award and President’s Media Award for Live Action for At the Bottom of the Sea. She graduated from Emily Carr University’s Film program with a minor in Social Practice and Community Engagement in 2020. Her films have screened at DOXA, VIFF, Hot Docs, Antimatter and Portland IFF. Caroline often explores the themes of diasporic identity, feminism, spirituality, community, ecology, sensation and movement in her work and employs analogue handmade film, performance, autoethnography and sound as mediums for expression.
Inbetweenness
Mona Kasra | 2020 | 6 min
Inbetweenness alludes to the ambiguities of deterritorialization and of hybrid cultural identity. It navigates a destabilizing state of diasporic existence by reimagining and experiencing a childhood home through digital mapping tools. Searching for traces of the past within satellite imagery, aerial photography and 360° photography, Kasra yearns for a sense of belonging to her homeland.
Mona Kasra is a new media artist, interdisciplinary researcher and Assistant Professor of Digital Media Design at the University of Virginia (UVA). Her work has been exhibited in galleries and online exhibitions and she has juried, curated and programmed for various film festivals and art exhibitions.
Inauguration
Peng Zuqiang | 2020 | 14 min
Through a series of anachronistic travels and narratives between Texas, California and Havana, the film offers an assemblage of two disparate events at the margins of Chinese revolutionary history: the forgotten story of an unsuccessful assassination attempt in 1910 by George Fong, a member of the Young China Association, who aimed to eliminate a royal prince of the Qing Empire while he was traveling in the United States. The film intertwines this failed assassination with the story of two Chinese-Cuban activists who travelled to the United States for the Young China Association's inauguration one year prior in 1909.
Movements, geographies and events do not follow a linear arc but rather are scattered across memories and places, only to be treated as residues, witnesses or simply discards of history. What happens when the premise of the story is, in fact, the assurance of its erasure? The film narrates a forecast of the past, wherein it renders visible the processes of erasure, remembrance and archival anchors of the early overseas Chinese revolutionary politics and its aftermaths.
Peng Zuqiang makes moving images. Zuqiang’s works have been shown at exhibitions and festivals internationally including UCCA Beijing, Open City Documentary Festival, IDFA, Antimatter and Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. He has received fellowships and residencies from the MacDowell, Skowhegan, the Core Program and the Lighthouse Works. Zuqiang is the recipient of the Jury Special Prize from the 8th Huayu Youth Award and a Special Mention from Festival Film Dokumenter, Yogyakarta for his first feature film, Nan.